What goes into a motorcycle seat? Custom builds often require an extra personal touch, whether it’s for style or for comfort. There are many ways to build bikes, and similarly, there are many ways to make a motorcycle seat.
There are, indeed, so many ways to make a seat, so much so that it might make your head spin. However, there is no right or wrong way to design a motorcycle. In fact, you can build pretty much whatever you want, as is the case with any of our build features on RideApart. There is a right-er way to build a seat, and this video outlines the process of conceptualizing, designing, and building a seat pretty well.
RACER TV on YouTube covers everything you want and more about cafe racers and custom motorcycles in general. The channel has been dedicating its time to custom content for quite some time now, and this is its latest video at the time of writing.
“This is not an exact science,” as the video states in its intro. There is no perfect seat and just like how “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” custom motorcycles will always be different from one another, and there is no one perfect seat for all.
However, on the topic of the styles of seats that most custom builds employ, the brat style is a common sight in the scene, mainly due to its simplicity and its ability to accommodate a rear passenger. However, there are more nuances to the style of seat when looks are the concern. The bike looks better when the subframe is cohesive with the shape of the saddle.
For cafe racers, head on over to the RACER TV’s channel to get a more in-depth analysis and thesis about the proportions of cafe racers, however, there is a proper height that the rear hump of cafe racer-style seats need to achieve, and it’s also detailed in the seat video.
Then there are the bobber-style seats, which are what they are.
The video goes rather in-depth about seats and even gives comparisons. A bike may look similar and adopt the same parts as another bike, but there could be subtle differences that will influence the look of a seat, more than you would have noticed at a glance. For an eight-minute video, not bad, and definitely worth the watch.
